Solid foundation: Nelch & Son marks 118 years in concrete business

Saturday

Apr 19, 2014 at 9:30 PMApr 20, 2014 at 11:35 AM

By Tim LandisBusiness Editor

An early slogan at Henry Nelch & Son Co. of Springfield was “A Foundation for a Great City.”

Among the high-profile projects since Henry Nelch opened the concrete and building-materials company in 1896: the Executive Mansion, sidewalks in Leland Grove, the Thomas Rees Memorial Carillon in Washington Park, the Illinois Bell (now AT&T) tower, St. John’s Hospital, the Sangamon County Complex and the Franklin Life building (now Illinois State Police).

Nelch & Son — the son was Benjamin Franklin Nelch — operates a fleet of 16 trucks from the headquarters at 800 S. Ninth St., where the company has been based since 1906. The Ninth Street location also includes a commercial-door operation.

A mixing plant was added on Great Northern Road, on the city’s west side, in 1993.

There are 30 full-time employees, though the figure changes with the construction season.

Brother and sister Rob and Mary Jo Nelch are the fifth generation to head the family business. A sixth generation, Rob’s daughter, Lauren Nelch, works in sales.

Rob Nelch said he and his sister, and now his daughter, began work in the family business early on.

“I’ve been here since I was probably 13,” said Nelch, 56. “I mixed paint and cleaned shelves, and worked inside.”

Lauren, said Nelch, joined the firm out of college four years ago. A son, Andrew, is a project engineer in St. Louis.

“We still do brick and block, and other hard-scape materials,” Rob Nelch said. “We do a lot of landscape now.”

Henry Nelch, the son of German immigrants, was born near Beardstown in 1852. He worked as a grocery store clerk and letter carrier before taking up the brick mason trade that was a family tradition in Germany. In 1883, he helped found Nelch, Patterson & Striffler.

The company constructed brick-paved streets and sewer lines in Springfield. Nelch and his son shifted to the building-materials business in 1896 and opened a plant near 10th and Jackson streets.

Postcards, black-and-white photographs and newspaper clippings have been saved through the years. A photo from 1900 of Henry Nelch and his mule, “Good Boy,” is posted on the company website, http://www.nelch.com/home.html.

But Rob Nelch said the basic business — mixing and pouring concrete — has not changed that much. Trends do come and go. Natural stone is now a popular residential building material.

The building-materials industry continues to feel the aftereffects of the recession, Nelch said. The company had a workforce of 55 and operated nearly two-dozen trucks when Nelch & Son marked its 100th year in 1996.

“It’s been tough,” Nelch said of the recent economy. “It has not made any kind of noticeable recovery as far as we’re concerned. Everything, across-the-board. There is no facet of the industry that’s made a decent recovery.”

Nelch said, in response to the sluggish economy, the company has renewed its focus on the core business.

“You kind of spread out, and you kind of pick and choose after awhile,” Nelch said. “You have to choose your battles.

“You pull back and figure out where your best profit margins are.”

Nelch said there are no plans for expansion or to add other businesses, though there is room for additional operations at the west-side location.

While the Ninth Street plant is along the west side of the 10th Street railroad tracks, Nelch said he does not expect long-term plans to consolidate Third Street trains on the 10th Street rail line to affect the site Nelch & Son has called home for more than 100 years.

“Everything we’ve been told is that everything will be on the east side of the tracks,” Nelch said. Contact Tim Landis: 788-1536, tim.landis@sj-r.com, twitter.com/timlandisSJR.

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